Is a museum collection only as good as the architecture that houses it? With the glut of contemporary museum design producing world-class buildings for even the most mundane of collections, that seems to be the consensus of the age. Yet there is no doubt that when a museum collection is distinguished enough, it can benefit from a well-designed container.

The Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany boasts just the sort of outstanding collection in need of a better home. Since 1995, the museum has been housed in an art museum on Theaterplatz that incorporates Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray’s 19th century classicist Kulissenhaus. As a piece of architecture it is not a bad building, but it is certainly a laughably incongruent style for one of the most influential modernist schools of the 20th century. Fortunately, this mish-mashed arrangement was always intended to be temporary, and this summer, an intriguing museum design was selected as a permanent home through the New Bauhaus Museum Competition.

Nashua, New Hampshire is no different than many of its neighbors in New England: with the closing of its mills, it is the site of a post industrial district needing rejuvenation and new ideas. With this in mind, the City decided to stage a one-stage design competition to find some creative solutions to this problem.

Medical technology and health care economics are being revolutionized.Meanwhile, both patients and doctors want hospitals to be more beautiful and humane places. And everyone hopes health facilities will become more environmentally sustainable.

With all that in mind, the enormous health care provider system Kaiser Permanente last year launched an ambitious competition for architects to design a small 100-bed hospital of the future. While a possible site would be in the high desert California community of Lancaster, the contest was really looking for a prototype that could be adapted in many settings, rural, suburban and city. After all, Kaiser Permanente already serves 8.7 million members in nine states and the District of Columbia and is growing.

How to express an idealistic learning environment in terms of bricks and mortar is hardly new. Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts is a recent example of the effort to encourage creative thinking by design at the post-graduate level. The University of Copenhagen in Denmark has taken up this idea by challenging a select group of architects to design the new Nils Bohr Science Park. They envision a ‘limitless community’ of academics and students, with lots of cross-pollination between disciplines.

Les Architectes FABG won the competition for a new cultural venue, including a professional theater on the St. Lawrence River in the Verdun Borough of Quebec Province. The project also provides for redevelopment and expansion of Verdun's resident school for circus performance (École de cirque de Verdun).

As part of a $27.4M capital campaign to update its building and exhibition areas, the Atlanta History Center settled on a design competition as a model to seek innovative ideas, not only for a redo of its circulation problems, but also to deal with an arrival issue—an outdated entrance and foyer.

The sponsors of the Taiwan Tower Competition have managed to come up with a departure from a generic solution to an observation tower. Instead of settling on the ubiquitous column with a sphere on top, they picked a green solution by the Japanese architect, Sou Fujimoto, which simultaneously conveys the appearance of a giant theater curtain, ready to reveal the unfolding of an interesting drama. Instead of illustrating the bare bones of a support system, the structure is shrouded in mystery, and, aside from its character as a model of sustainability, it should draw crowds of curiosity seekers for decades to come.

Aberdeen, Scotland has long been the beneficiary of the oil bonanza off its coast in the North Sea. But faced with declining oil revenues from this source, the community now finds itself at a crossroads: how do you reinvent yourself while a once dependable revenue stream is slowly disappearing? Urban issues logically came to the forefront, and the discussion concentrated on Aberdeen City Gardens, an underused park smack in the middle of the city. If this relatively dormant piece of real estate could be turned into a people place for the community and beyond, it might not only help to rejuvenate the city’s urban core, but provide it with an asset having a symbolic value well beyond that of a common green space.

Can reducing class size and hiring more qualified teachers be the only answer to improving our educational system? Not according to the goals set forth by the organizers of the most recent 2011 Cleveland Design Competition. This open contest challenged architects to come up with new ideas, keeping pace with “the continuing advancements in pedagogy, curricula and organization models.” In other words, why shouldn’t equal attention be devoted to the “reinvention of learning environments.”

First Place Entry by Catherine Mosbach, Philippe Rahm, and Ricky Liu and Associates

Taichung is a city with grand ambitions. Taiwan’s third largest metropolis has been developing an impressive inventory of architecture and planning projects that envision the city as a new hub for design innovation and inspiration. And as in Taipei and Kaohsiung, open international design competitions are an important part of this process, attracting creative talent from around the globe and prompting compelling, forward-thinking designs. Taichung first garnered the attention of the global design community with 2010’s Taiwan Tower Competition, a forum that sought an iconic design for a landmark observation tower commemorating the centennial anniversary of the founding of Taiwan. The winning project, an eye-catching, garden-topped “21st Century Oasis” designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, is sure to become a major attraction for the city.

If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.

In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.

Reconstituting an Abandoned Rail Line

The Rails to Trails program, which gained momentum after the1984 Federal Land Banking Law—supported by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy—has seen over 24,000 miles of trails established where rail lines once existed. Some sites were strictly urban, while others, sometimes over 100 miles in length, were primarily rural, while others combined some of both.

Plans for the Final Expansion of Schultes’ Federal Chancellery Building

The reunification of Germany in 1989 not only had a great impact on the lives of many Germans, especially those living in the former DDR,but together with the decision to move the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin resulted in two major international design competitions in 1992: the first was to convert the existing Reichstag building into a home for the German parliament, the second being the Spreebogen planning competition, which included a chancellery for the head of state as well as needed buildings nearby for the Federal government.

The Renovation of a City Landmark

The renovation of Miremont-le-Cret n 2012 was unusual in that the project was the subject of a competition. This building had long been landmarked as one of Geneva’s most significant modern accomplishments, designed in 1953 by a local architect, Marc-Joseph Saugey. The building’s design is remarkable in how it fits into a somewhat narrow, elongated site, but solving the issue of monotony that could naturally arise had the facades not consisted of a simple elevation with no protruding edges. Instead Saugey came up with the idea of a faceted treatment of the facade on both sides of the structure, thus eliminating any notion of boredom on the part of a casual visitor.

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